[l2ridehd]

Annuities only benefit the person selling the annuity.

allus70, I personally would not be that conservative right now. As the next post pointed out, bonds are going to go down in value when interest rates rise. I would adjust your AA to something closer to 50/50 or even 55/45 right now. Especially if you do not need the funds for 9 or 10 years. I personal like age minus 15 for bonds vs the age in bonds common practice. But as suggested your AA should look at your total investments not just your IRA. Place most of your bond allocation in your IRA and your stocks in your non IRA accounts. Use 80% index funds for all your investments and maybe add a decent dividend fund to the equities to lower the risk you add by lowering the bond percentage. But pick an asset allocation your comfortable with while being a little aggressive and re-balance with a 5% drift. Re-balancing forces you to buy low and sell high.

A second option would be to select a target retirement fund that is about a 50/50 mix and let them manage it for the next 10 years. They will re-balance to move your AA every year to move you from 50/50 to 40/60 over the next ten years.

A third even simpler option, however not diversified enough for me, put 50% into Vanguard Wellsely (35/65 AA) and 50% into Vanguard Wellington (65/35 AA) and then each year move 10% of Wellington to Wellsely.